In a performance conceived by the ensemble and co-presented with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art as part of this year's Time-Based Art Festival, the piece traveled to the far frontiers of string quartet practice in significant ways.

It was performed in total darkness, as the composer intended, hence the planetarium, the darkest space they could find. In the absence of a traditional score and visual cues, the quartet -- violinists Ron Blessinger and Greg Ewer, violist Charles Noble, and cellist Marilyn DeOliveira -- worked semi-improvisationally with a set of gestures in a call-and-response format, one player offering a gesture as an invitation and the others accepting or declining but eventually joining in, one way or another, 18 times in all. Performance times can vary widely, but each of Third Angle's, Tuesday through Thursday, lasted about an hour.

Few of the gestures involved conventionally played notes, to say nothing of melodies. They included tiny descending pizzicati, eerily swooping double-stopped glissandi, long glassy notes played on the bridge and the croaking sound of bows clutching strings in slow, heavy motion.

The otherworldly soundscape heightened the effect of the darkness, which in itself elicited a primal response, putting the non-visual senses, hearing, especially, on high alert. Allowing for the possibility that disconcerted listeners might have to leave the room, the lights were lowered briefly before the performance for a taste of pitch blackness, and the audience given instructions for extraction: clap twice, raise, your hands, and an usher with a flashlight would escort you out.

With the quartet spaced evenly around the edges of the room, the listening experience varied depending on your seat: Tuesday I happened to be right next to Noble and could hear every sound of his hands on the viola, while Ewer's violin was at times nearly inaudible; at Thursday's midnight performance I sat in the innermost row, and the spacious, evenly balanced sound created a sensation like floating in a lake on a moonless night, but with sounds instead of stars.

The playing itself was, well, stellar. Haas presents challenges both obvious, such the myriad string effects, and less so, such as unconventional intonations; the quartet mastered them not only from memory and in the dark, but, particularly on Thursday, with an attentiveness that lent a sense of spontaneity and tension.

Haas' quartet was perhaps thrilling as an aesthetic experience or an intellectually gratifying exercise in modernist process and extended string techniques, but its spiritual impact made it transcendent. The subtitle, "In iij. Noct.," refers to Holy Saturday and the third night of the mostly defunct Tenebrae service, the darkest night of the liturgical year, when candles are extinguished to signify the absence of the light of Christ between the crucifixion and the resurrection; one of the 18 sections quotes the setting of the Tenebrae Responsories by the tormented 16th-century Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo, and it's a soul-emptying moment. The players represented people, blind and bereft, attempting to connect in fragmentary utterances, stuttering, gasping and hoarse, and when they did achieve unison, it was in keening and lamentation. At the end of the last section, a pulse fading into silence, the light returned and the relief was profound.